Bridget Riley : Transcending the Visual

Forty-eight years after her first exhibition at the Hayward Gallery made her the darling of the art world, Bridget Riley’s largest-ever retrospective has just opened on the South Bank. Tracing the titan’s creative development from adolescence onward, Bridget Riley includes figurative paintings she made as a schoolgirl at Cheltenham Ladies' College; the disorientating 1960s masterpieces that began an artistic revolution; and standout works such as 'Continuum', a metallic spiral booth (and the only sculpture the 88 year old has ever made). When Vogue photographed Riley in her east London studio [for the January 2018 issue], she spoke candidly about discipline, inspiration – and giving her life to her art. Read her full interview with fashion features editor and senior associate digital editor Ellie Pithers.

EP : We’re sitting in your studio, which is a large room with a sort of walled off stage area, in east London. What did this building used to be?

BR : A man called Mr Hega built this building as a refuge for women and children in the area, as a sort of antidote to the depression in the 1930s. This room was an auditorium – there’s a stage behind this wall. A few years ago, a man was standing outside looking at the building, so I asked if he was OK, and he said he had performed in a nativity here as a child. There are five pubs in the area, so the men would go to the pub and the women and children would come here and put on plays. We have two apartments so I can stay here overnight if I need to.

EP : What was the art world like when you began your career?

BR : In the 1960s, for everyone involved in the art world, there was a real excitement at being able to get started after all the endless frustrations of recovery from the war. It took a long time – it took ages to get going. But the interesting thing was how everyone was involved. There was a wide feeling of engagement. Vogue was big, absolutely, on both sides of the Atlantic. And I wrote something called ‘On Swimming Through A Diamond’ [an essay published in British Vogue in March 1984], about working with colour for this exhibition. And this little piece in British Vogue was about what I had experienced in Cornwall, about the Seven Bays – the bays are not mentioned specifically but they are all there – and I was always very pleased that Vogue published it.

EP : You have a singularity of vision that has propelled and sustained you over the years. How have you remained so steadfast in your vision?

BR : My work is all that I feel, really, and all that I think. So, in a way, it’s all that I have [laughs]. And… it’s a vehicle for my life. So, everything goes into it, and the disciplines are essential. I’ve exercised a discipline in my work, which has strengthened it and allowed me to give more of myself to it than if I had sort of…done a bit of work and then gone on and done a bit of something else. So, it is very interesting – I am interested in what I do and I’m interested in other painters, what they have done. I find the whole subject interesting.

EP : I love the piece in Vogue because you talk about vision, and how you go out into the world and you see the sky, for instance, and you can never recapture that particular moment of vision, of how it looked that one time you saw it. I like how that idea comes through in your work – with this painting, looking at it, you don’t see the same thing twice.

BR : Good, good. I hope I am able to sustain “looking”, so that there are more things to see. And, as you say, you come back to it another time and see it differently. That is very much what I believe in. And I think it’s what’s kept a lot of painters going: the fact that their own vision changes. And so they’re able to add to what they’ve been doing. You always part with some things, because your present tense will exclude… it must shift. How you look is as important as what you look at. And, gradually, it’s been shifted round, so that painting is a vehicle for sight. And so it is possible to look at some of the great masters of modern art and look through their eyes, look at how they looked. And that is a wonderful thing to do.

EP : How do you want people to view your work? Is it best to sit down in front of this wall and stare at it for 20 minutes?

BR : No, I think that the viewer is like me. I know he or she is like me. And what I see, they will see. So, as I’ve found my way into engagement with whatever piece of work I’m doing, so will they.

EP : Tell me about this work in particular [we are sitting in front of ‘Quiver 3’, a very large work that entirely covers one wall].

BR : I think painting starts with the support. In this case, the wall is the support. And the wall is absolutely flat. Seurat said that “painting is the art of hollowing a surface” [laughs]. The surface of a wall is a very obvious thing, but it’s impalpable. So, I both assert the wall and open it up into a series of planes. The wall… has become permeable, something which is taking up space inside itself, you know. You can look out from the painting and another bit of wall is around it – that’s completely fine, that’s wall. But down here where the white planes emerge, they are breaking that surface, hollowing it, as Seurat said. [laughs].

EP : When you came into the room earlier, the first thing you did was have a look at the wall and say, “One of these triangles needs its edge straightening up.”

BR : Yes, I’ve been worrying about it [laughs]. I’d seen it beforehand, and I had thought, no, I don’t think that’s right, and it was a wonderful opportunity to just do it and see how it looks.

EP : And is that something instinctive, something you feel isn’t quite right, or is it an aesthetic pattern you’re working from?

BR : No, it’s an instinctive feeling – I know it’s not right. Or, I know it is right. That is something which I listen to and pay great attention to, and always have. That is a guiding light. And you may have to give up something you have anticipated will be good or a success... If you give something up which you have really pinned a lot of hopes on, you find your way. You are no longer blocked by a misleading concept.

EP : What do you do when you need to reset your mind?

BR : With each endeavour, with each group of work, I don’t understand it to begin with. That’s part of the pleasure and the excitement and the interest in actually working with it. When I do understand it, I lose interest.

EP : You’ve figured it out?

BR : I’ve experienced it, I think. And the evidence is there. The paintings are there or the studies are there. And I look for a way out. I look for the next thing. And, somewhere, there will be a hint. Something… thinking about it when I’m away from it, I will suddenly see – or think – “Oh, I know what I do next.” It grows out of it.

EP : Are you very disciplined with your time? Do you work every day?

BR : No, I don’t get the chance unfortunately.

EP : You live in west London?

BR : Yes, that’s right. But there are an awful lot of things to do – like talking to you. And… that I do that is part and parcel of my work, which I have to do. The best time for me to work is straight out of bed in the morning. If I can, I get up, make a cup of tea, and sometimes I don’t even drink it. I get into the studio, and I can then work, because I’m very close to… I suppose what I have been close to, my unconscious. So I am only just coming out of that. I have access to a level which, as the day takes shape, tends to get distracted. I can recover it. But it’s best in the morning. That kind of lucidity. Being in touch with what one is actually really feeling.

'My Work Is A Vehicle For My Life' - A Rare Audience With Op-Art Pioneer Bridget Riley. By Ellie Pithers.  British Vogue , October  28, 2019

The desire to be a painter may spring from any of several sources. One might be stirred by other paintings seen in an art gallery or a private house—or one may be prompted by a wish for self-expression, a longing to convey something deeply felt. It may have come from a need to make an artefact, to build or fabricate, to shape and organise so as to bring a new entity into existence, to even simply from the pleasure of painting itself. All these reasons may play a part but in my case there was an additional one, and that was sight.

Long before I ever saw a major painting, felt the need to share an experience, knew the excitement of invention or painted my first watercolor, I had been fortunate enough to discover what "looking" can be—sometimes in a mere glance one can see more than in the close scrutiny of a thousand details.

I spent my childhood in Cornwall, which of course was an ideal place in which to make such discoveries. Changing seas and skies, a coastline ranging from the grand to the intimate, bosky woods and secretive valleys; what I experienced there formed the basis of my visual life.

Swimming through the oval, saucer-like reflections, dipping and flashing on the sea surface, one traced the colors back to the origins of those reflections. Some came directly from the sky and different colored clouds, some from the golden greens of the vegetation growing on the cliffs, some from the red-orange of the seaweed on the blues and violets of adjacent rocks, and, all between, the actual hues of the water, according to its various depths and over what it was passing. The entire elusive, unstable, flicking complex subject to the changing qualities of the light itself. On a fine day, for instance, all was bespattered with the glitter of bright sunlight and its tiny pinpoints of virtually black shadow—it was as though one was swimming through a diamond.

Taking dawn-walks over the cliffs when one's footsteps left a curiously flat heavy green mark in the pearly turquoise of the dew.

Looking directly into the sun over a foreshore of rocks exposed by the tide—all reduced to a violent black and white contrast, interspersed, here and there, by the glitter of water.

Delving into the minute grey and yellow word of the lichens, which encrust rocks and stems of trees like the work of the finest gold- and silver-smiths, setting off the sudden green of a patch of moss.

Dipping a bucket into shadowed water and suddenly seeing a right blue patch of reflected sky appear in the broken surface.

Going up and down valleys and around twisting corners there was a constant interchange of horizon lines, cliff-tops and brows of hills—narrow slivers of color rhythmically weaving and layering, edge against edge. And sometimes, on turning into a completely different aspect of the landscape, which—especially if this sun was behind—one encountered almost as though the new view was a monumental edifice, so flat and dense did the color seem.

Gazing at the reflected blue of the sky in a sandy pool which turns from pale yellow through jade to turquoise unexpectedly accommodating a curious compound, a non-color resembling ashy grey.

Seeing first the white of foam, the blues of sea and sky through the delicate tracery of a row of bare trees in winter and then seeing the same view uninterrupted. In one context a wide expanse receding towards a distant horizon, in the other a vertical 'cloisonné' of brilliant fragmented color.

Walking over the cliffs on a windy day—the rough grass snaking before one as though so many tiny silver pennants were fastened to the earth.

Noticing how the green of the tamarisk appears more yellow against the blue of the sea than it does against the greys of landscape.

Watching the narrow dark streaks of ruffled water—violets, blues and many shades of grey—as a sudden squall swept over the sea.

But whatever the occasion might be, the pleasures of sight have one characteristic in common—they take you by surprise. They are sudden, swift and unexpected. If one tries to prolong them, recapture them or bring them about wilfully their purity and freshness is lost. They are essentially enigmatic and elusive. One can stare at a landscape, for example, which a moment ago seemed vibrant and find it inert and dull—so one cannot say that this lively quality of sight is simply 'out there in nature,' or easily available to be commanded as wished. Nor is it a state of mind which, once acquired, can bend the most stubborn and unrewarding aspect of external reality to its own purposes. It is neither the one nor the other but a perfect balance between the two, between the inner and the outer. This balance is a sort of convergence which releases a particular alchemy, momentarily turning the commonplace into the ravishing.

Naturally, as a child one is more open to such experiences. When one gets older these tend to take place less often—that is they seldom appear any longer as pure revelations. But this does not mean that one has come to see things as they really are or any more truthfully. The damage is mostly done by the daily round with its heavy load of pressures and preoccupations which comes between, like a plate glass window, and through which one can certainly see but through which no vision can penetrate.

It seems to me that an artist's work lies here. I realised partly through my own experience and partly through the great masters of Modern art that it was not the actual sea, the individual rocks or valleys in themselves which constituted the essence of vision but that they were agents of a greater reality, of the bridge which sight throws from our inner-most heart to the furthest extension of that which surrounds us.

I discovered that I was painting in order to 'make visible.' On one hand I had to make something which had this essential quality of precipitating itself as 'surprise' and, simultaneously, there was no way of knowing with what one was dealing until it existed; so that in order to see one had to paint and through that activity found what could be seen.

The black and white paintings which I did in the Sixties laid bare this circular process. People found them hard to understand because the elements I used seemed far removed from the experience they produced. Habitually people expect to recognise in a painting something already known in a literal sense. I wanted to bring about some fresh way of seeing again what had already almost certainly been experienced, but which had either been dismissed or buried by the passage of time; that thrill of pleasure which sight itself reveals.

Color is the proper means for what I want to do because it is prone to inflections and inductions existing only through relationship; malleable yet tough and resilient. I do not select single colors but rather pairs, triads, or groups of color which taken together act as generators of what can be seen through or via the painting. By which I mean that the colors are organised on the canvas so that the eye can travel over the surface in a way parallel to the way it moves over nature. It should feel caressed ad soothed, experience frictions and ruptures, glide and drift. Vision can be arrested, tripped up or pulled back in order to float free again. It encounters reflections, echoes and fugitive flickers which when traced evaporate. One moment there will be nothing to look at and there next second the canvas suddenly seems to refill, to be crowded with visual events.

More than anything else I want my paintings to exist on their own terms. That is to say they must stealthily engage and disarm you. There the paintings hang, deceptively simple—telling no tales as it were—resisting, in a well-behaved way, all attempts to be questioned, probed or stared at and then, for those with open eyes, serenely disclosing some intimations of the splendors to which pure sight alone has the key.  

The Pleasures of Sight.  A text by the artist from 1984.  David Zwirner 

Creating a site that the viewer occupies visually is a central concern of Bridget Riley’s black-and-white paintings. Whether presented as a field of activity or in the form of a self-contained image, her early paintings draw the gaze of the viewer, whose ensuing perceptual involvement is immersive. As a result, the observer inhabits the virtual space of the painting. The same imperative remains true of her subsequent work and, while using other strategies, it continues to the present. In 1963, however, she considered whether it was possible to engage the spectator even more completely. She saw that the paintings exist at a remove, separated by an intervening space; however ‘devouring’ their relationship with the viewer, the work of art is something external. The question was how to dissolve that separation, so that the viewer is actually in the painting.

That ambition was prompted partly by seeing Monet’s Water Lilies at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris during her earlier visit with [Maurice] De Sausmarez. Monet’s success in producing a field of color that envelops the viewer had made an indelible impression. In particular, she was struck by the intimate relationship that these large works establish with anyone standing in proximity. With their entire field of vision filled, the spectator ceases to be an onlooker and, instead, becomes an occupant of the world created by the artist. On that earlier occasion in Paris she had absorbed the thrilling insight occasioned by Monet’s paintings, and it was one that she now wished to emulate for her second solo exhibition at Gallery One using her own visual language of black and white. Her aim was to extend the perceptual situation proposed in her paintings by making a physical structure that the viewer could physically enter and occupy. In realizing that idea, Bridget turned to her companion Peter Sedgley for assistance. Taking time off from the building project at Les Bassacs, he returned to London and together they devised the three-dimensional construction that would be titled Continuum (1963).

The entire structure was approximately 28 feet long, six feet and ten inches high and twelve feet in diameter. Resembling a large shell, it comprised seven wooden panels that interlocked in a continuous coiled arrangement. While the exterior walls retained a purely functional appearance, the interior was painted in white emulsion, creating a surface for large chevron shapes in black. The viewer entered a sanctum-like inner space through a vertical aperture between the ends of the encircling wall. Standing in that internal area, the occupant was completely surrounded by the interplay of black-and-white shapes; with all external viewpoints removed, the spectacle was both enveloping and highly disorientating. In common with the paintings hanging elsewhere in the exhibition, Continuum destabilised the viewer’s field of vision. The dynamic action of expanding and contracting chevron shapes produced hallucinatory movements, undulations in space and unpredictable, dazzling discharges of light. But in a further development, while standing inside Continuum the viewer could turn around and shift their gaze within an enclosed space. That expanded view powerfully augmented the sensation of being ‘devoured’. In effect, virtual space and real space had overlapped and merged. The result was an all-encompassing intensification, generating an experience at once perceptual and uncompromisingly physical.

Continuum was a powerful demonstration that Bridget’s agenda far exceeded the boundaries of purely optical art. That lesson was not lost on Norbert Lynton, who reviewed the exhibition for Art International. In his earlier response to her first show Lynton had made a connection with Victor Vasarely’s research into visual dynamics. Now he concentrated on the expressive capacity of her work in terms of bodily experience. He began with a ringing endorsement: "Quite the most brilliant (in more than one sense of the word) exhibition in London… is that at Gallery One: Bridget Riley’s second one-man show." Having identified the complementary directions advanced by the field and image paintings, he then continued:

Riley has done the seemingly impossible by tightening her work up still further, excluding the one or two playful pictures that had crept into her first show. And yet these paintings are beguiling. One has to write of them as though they were nothing but scientific diagrams exploiting and illuminating the mechanics of human vision and setting up a kind of domestic conflict between expectations and visual data, but they are more than merely fascinating. They are physically stimulating and compelling. More than the eye and the conceptual vision department of the mind are involved: each work is a bodily experience that draws the spectator into a world where vertical and horizontal and gravitational pull are no longer the controlling facts – a world more like that experienced in swimming or perhaps sky diving.

Lynton’s review gave the exhibition a valuable international endorsement, but it was significant in another way. Extending the views expressed in his first review, it now situated her alongside but also apart from Op Art, the artistic context into which, from this time onwards, she would steadily be drawn by other critics. Op Art, as it would become known from 1964 onwards, had its roots in developments that had taken place in France in the mid-1950s. Spearheaded by Vasarely, there was a widening interest in paintings and sculpture that cultivated effects of movement, light and other sensory phenomena. Exhibitions held in Paris and Zagreb in 1955 and 1961 conferred an expanding international visibility on that movement. In his response to her first show, Lynton had not been alone in making links between Bridget and Continental artists concerned with optical research. Writing in Arts Review in May 1962, Michael Shepherd had made a similar connection. He identified her "as being in the vanguard of a branch of research in contemporary art which is a world-wide concern at the moment: the integration of optical, scientific effects into the language of painting." By contrast, Lynton’s response to the second exhibition cited Bridget’s involvement with "bodily experience," implying an essential difference between her work and the optical art then being produced elsewhere. But that view was by no means widely held. The success of the Gallery One exhibition meant that from this point on her work was regularly included in group shows, and that exposure ensured that she enjoyed a rapidly growing profile. At the same time, however, her work would increasingly be connected with wider tendencies even though such links were tangential or superficial.

The extent to which Bridget was aware of the developments in optical art is debatable. By her own later account, she did not encounter Vasarely’s work until 1962 or 1963, when she was invited to the home of a collector who had seen her work at Gallery One. That, of course, does not discount a degree of second-hand awareness from ideas and reports that circulated at the time. But evidence of any first-hand influence by the Hungarian, or other artists connected with Le Mouvement as it was known, upon the direction that she took in 1961 is unsubstantiated. The sources of her work – and its motives – lay elsewhere. Eschewing visual research, Bridget’s devotion to developing visual structures in an intuitive and improvised way is a defining characteristic of her approach. By contrast, the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel insisted on rational, systematic, research-based methods, which prioritised optical effects over the expression of emotion. The artists and artistic movements that she has cited as models – notably Seurat and Futurism – belong to a much earlier time frame. The closest contemporary influence that she acknowledged was the phenomenon known as Happenings that came into vogue from the late 1950s. The involvement of spectators in a live event-based situation caught her attention and sympathy and has clear parallels with her own aims. In both ways of working, the principle of dynamic engagement is conspicuous. That said, the theatrical aspect of Happenings stood at a remove to Bridget’s single-minded commitment to painting.

Following the exhibition at Gallery One, Bridget would not have another solo exhibition until 1965, when she showed at the Richard Feigen Gallery in New York. In the meantime, however, the group exhibitions in which she participated, and the attention that these attracted, sustained an ever-increasing reputation. That process had commenced with Ten Years, which was held at Gallery One immediately prior to her second solo show. Selected by Victor Musgrave, the exhibition brought together artists whose work had been presented at the gallery in the preceding ten years. The timing was fortuitous, the inclusion of Ascending and Descending (Hero) providing a foretaste of her imminent solo exhibition. More significantly, Ten Years marked the first time that her work was seen in an international context. The artists from abroad with whom she showed included Yves Klein, Henri Michaux, Rufino Tamayo, and Enrico Baj.

That outing was followed by inclusion in the John Moores Liverpool Exhibition to which she submitted Blaze 3 (1963). The jury included two artists of a very different persuasion – Peter Lanyon and William Coldstream – as well as the curator and art historian Ronald Alley representing the Tate Gallery. She won a non-purchase prize of £100, but there was more to come. The year 1963 concluded with a piece in The Times, which announced that "Miss Bridget Riley, whose painting Fall was recently bought by the Tate Gallery, has been awarded this year’s Critics Prize." The acquisition of one of her most distinctive early paintings speaks of support from Alley, who was acutely aware of the need to build the Tate’s holdings of contemporary art. For Bridget, representation in the national collection was an important staging post in a career that was now clearly gathering momentum.

The following year provided confirmation, if any was needed, that Bridget Riley had joined the ranks of the first division of leading British artists. She was included in no fewer than eight group shows, several of which took place overseas. In Six Young Painters, an Arts Council exhibition that toured to various venues in the United Kingdom, Bridget’s work was placed alongside that of Peter Blake, William Crozier, David Hockney, Dorothy Mead and Euan Uglow. As the accompanying catalogue noted, these were artists "whose names are becoming established in this country – and indeed abroad." The selection drew together exponents of markedly different tendencies. Pop Art, expressive figuration, observation from life and – courtesy of Bridget – the latest abstract painting were all represented. Her growing international prominence was signalled by inclusion in Nouvelle Tendance, a large group exhibition held at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris. Its title refers to the group of Continental artists, formed in Paris, whose involvement with kinetic and Op Art formed common ground. Bridget was the only British representative in a line-up of 52 artists dominated by men. In November she was included in The New Generation: 1964 held at the Whitechapel Gallery, London. She was one of a group of 12 artists described by its visionary Director Bryan Robertson as "conspicuously brilliant and gifted." That David Thompson, one of the judges associated with the exhibition, could justifiably describe the wider context as "a boom-period for modern art" evokes a sense of the distinction that Bridget had so quickly achieved.

Three exhibitions that cemented Bridget’s international profile now came in swift succession. The first of these, Painting and Sculpture of a Decade 1954–1964, was organised by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and held at the Tate Gallery, London, from April to June 1964. As its title suggests, the exhibition surveyed the artistic developments that had occurred in the preceding ten years through a stellar line-up of over 50 leading figures from around the world. For Bridget’s work to be shown alongside that of such senior luminaries as Picasso, Joan Miró and Barnett Newman was an extraordinary advance given that her work had been unknown only two years previously. This remarkable year of achievement concluded with her inclusion in Contemporary British Painting and Sculpture, held at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, from October to November, and Motion and Movement, an exhibition of kinetic painting and sculpture mounted at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Ohio, from November to December. With these exhibitions, her reputation now had a foothold in America. They were important steps in a heady ascent that would lead to celebrity status on both sides of the Atlantic.

Bridget Riley’s achievement of international prominence came with her inclusion in The Responsive Eye, which opened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in January 1965. Curated by William C. Seitz, this ambitious exhibition comprised 123 works by artists from 15 countries. Seitz’s original intention, as stated in the accompanying catalogue, was to chart the development of paintings with a "primarily visual emphasis", from Impressionism to the present. However, as he conceded, the recent proliferation of art with an ‘optical’ basis made a historical survey impossible, and he chose instead to concentrate on contemporary art that he characterised as having a ‘perceptual’ character. That conceptual framework was a loose one. It emphasised the subjective nature of seeing, which, as Seitz rightly pointed out, was bound up with thinking, feeling and remembering. This was something of a catch-all, and as he acknowledged, even with a narrower chronological focus, the scope of the resulting survey was diverse. It embraced various tendencies, ranging from kinetic art to hard-edge abstraction, with artists as radically different in character as Kenneth Noland and Agnes Martin. The selection is notable not least for including Peter Sedgley, who was by now also developing an independent artistic profile.

Despite the porous nature of Seitz’s selection, one unifying characteristic was that the works were all abstract, his argument being that any form of representation deflects from "the purely perceptual effect of lines, areas and colors." That rationale conferred a seeming unity on what in reality was a heterogeneous body of work by artists practising in many different ways. In that respect, the exhibition would draw its critical detractors. Even so, the show was a huge popular success and, despite its expansive outlook, it would be viewed as a manifesto for a new phenomenon: Op Art. The visibility of the new style, which attracted a wide audience through an ever-attentive American media, was helped by Seitz himself, who contributed an article to Vogue magazine. While that kind of publicity galvanised public interest, it also had the effect of alienating sections of the art establishment, particularly certain critics, curators and academics who recoiled from the taint of populism surrounding the exhibition.

Aside from the media storm that it provoked, The Responsive Eye was controversial in other, more enduring ways. Its abiding significance is to have firmly established Op Art as an important artistic manifestation. At the same time, the movement—such as it was—would suffer from the perception of fashion-driven success. When the exhibition opened, Bridget found herself very much the focus of these different kinds of attention. Two of her paintings were included in the show, namely Current and Hesitate (both 1964). Of huge consequence to her ensuing reputation was the organisers’ decision to reproduce Current, which MoMA had recently acquired, on the cover of the catalogue. Seitz also singled out her work in his catalogue essay, which set out various themes within the overarching concept of perceptual abstraction. He noted that in Current, "The eyes seem to be bombarded with pure energy," Arguably less helpful was Seitz’s bracketing of her work with that of Vasarely, both artists being cited as exponents of black-and-white optical painting.

The recognition thus accorded to Bridget was a powerful endorsement, but by identifying her so conspicuously with the stylistic aspects of Op Art it was also misleading.

This, however, did not detract from her elevation to stardom. In addition to the enormous popular interest generated by the media, she was lionised by other artists in the exhibition, notably Josef Albers and Ad Reinhardt. Significantly, that wide acclaim translated into commercial success. All 16 paintings in Bridget’s solo exhibition at the Richard Feigen Gallery, which opened a week later, sold in advance. Those collectors who were disappointed when the availability of works was exhausted immediately registered on a waiting list. Critically and financially, her position seemed secure. Almost immediately, though, there was a backlash.

An excerpt from Paul Moorehouse's book Bridget Riley: A Very Very Person: The Early Years

The Dizzying Sudden Success of Op Artist Bridget Riley: A Close Look.  By Paul Moorhouse. Artspace, September  1, 2019.

Even for those familiar with modernism’s history in the latter half of the 20th century, the story of the life of the British painter Bridget Riley and the development of her work is not very well known. Now, though, Paul Moorhouse’s well-researched, lucid new biography, Bridget Riley: A Very Very Person (Ridinghouse, 2019) may help reveal to a broad audience the full scope and richness of her unusual, distinctive oeuvre, which was recognized in the 1960s as the embodiment of Op Art.

A former senior curator at London’s Tate Gallery and National Portrait Gallery, Moorhouse first met Riley, who was born in 1931, around the time he was organizing a small retrospective exhibition of her work at the first of those two institutions.

That presentation, in 2003, followed a 1998 show at Abbot Hall Art Gallery, a small museum in the Lake District in northwestern England. During a recent telephone interview, speaking from his home in London, Moorhouse recalled that the Abbot Hall exhibition had “marked a turning point in Riley’s career, for she had been eclipsed, and not much had been heard about her or her art for more than two decades until that time.”

His new Riley biography, he notes in its introduction, is a response to “a dearth of information about the artist herself” that characterizes the existing literature about her career and the innovative works of geometric abstraction for which she is best known. Subtitled “The Early Years,” it covers the period from Riley’s birth in London through her breakthrough onto the international art scene in the mid-1960s.

Moorhouse writes that, although “the perceptual experiences” that Riley’s abstract paintings generate “are self-contained, it would be a mistake to assume that their significance is only optical.” Like Pablo Picasso’s biographer, John Richardson, or, more recently, Jed Perl, the author of the first-ever, in-depth biography of Alexander Calder, Moorhouse digs into the details of his subject’s life story in order to comprehend her interest in art and her approach to making it, as well as the character of what she created.

For Moorhouse, the key to understanding her dynamically patterned, optically dazzling paintings lies in the recognition that, as he observed in our recent conversation, “even though her abstract works feel so self-contained, they are rooted in personal expression and express a personality.”

His book aims to bring together the story of Riley’s life and that of her singular art, which evolved out of her earlier, intensive engagement with drawing and her exploration of the Impressionists’ pointillist technique, and to show that they are inseparable. To gather the information he needed in order to analyze such an indelible, life-and-art connection, he began interviewing Riley in depth in 2014.

“We met at her home in London every Friday,” he told me, noting that, as his encounters with the artist progressed, Riley, who was going through a personal break-up, said of their regular chats, “This really is helping me.” He described Riley as candid, but he added, “She is very intense and does nothing by half measures, and may be seen as an uncompromising person. Her powers of recollection are astonishing.” When the artist was a little girl, one of her grandmothers described her as “a very very person.”

Moorhouse gleaned from Riley a vivid sense of her childhood years in London and in a cottage in coastal Cornwall, in southwestern England, where Bridget, her younger sister, her mother, and her aunt, a woman who had studied art at Goldsmiths’ College in London and had been “something of a flapper, complete with bobbed hair and an emancipated outlook on life,” rode out the tense years of World War II while the future artist’s father, Jack, a printer, served in the military. For the women and girls, it was a time of anxiety and making-do, but young Bridget reveled in her immersion in nature, enchanted by the sea and the textures of the earth.

Moorhouse writes, “By the time she started school, Bridget was already a very difficult child. At an early age she had begun to be uncooperative, refusing to eat and being generally stubborn. […] Determined and obstinate, [she] did well at school but did not enjoy the learning environment.”

However, “in her nature studies she was said to be very interested and observant,” and her teachers recognized that she was artistically inclined. Later during the war years, the Riley sisters were sent to a Roman Catholic boarding school, where Bridget, sorely missing her seaside home, felt restless and out of place.

Riley’s father, who had become a POW in Southeast Asia, survived the experience and returned safely to England. Reunited, the Rileys moved back to a house in which they had earlier resided in Boston, north of London, where Bridget set up an art studio. For the teenager, Moorhouse writes, “drawing became a developing passion and provided a focus for exploring her interior life.”

“One of her earliest efforts was a picture depicting the explosion of an atomic bomb,” Moorhouse writes, but she also drew buildings, gardens, still lifes, and portraits. Riley went on to complete her secondary-school education, reluctantly, at another boarding school, where she sometimes got into trouble and was punished. However, she also found encouragement in the teaching of a young art instructor, Colin Hayes, who had attended the Ruskin School of Drawing in Oxford and was a protégé of Kenneth Clark, a former director of the National Gallery in London.

Riley learned a lot from Hayes, who admired the work of Rembrandt, Renoir, Bonnard, and Matisse. About his teaching method, Moorhouse writes — in an observation that sounds quaint in the face of today’s still-persistent, if worn-out, postmodernist “appropriationist” gestures and dogged rejection of technical proficiency — that “[c]entral to his approach was the principle that in order to fully comprehend a subject it was necessary to draw it.”

Although Riley’s parents were concerned about her material security as a woman in society, they accepted her decision to try to enter an art school and were suitably supportive when she landed a place at Goldsmiths’ College, where she began studying in 1949. She was 18 years old. However shy and immature she felt at first there, she also felt at home. Moorhouse writes, “The prospect of embarking on a life with art as its focus felt positive and celebratory, almost a luxury. Later she recalled, ‘I wanted joy.’”

At Goldsmiths’, she had hoped “to develop the means of responding to visual experience in pictorial terms,” but she was disappointed by the character of the instruction she received. Years later, as Moorhouse notes, in the catalogue of an exhibition of her early portrait drawings at the National Portrait Gallery in London, in 2010, Riley herself recalled that she had felt “unable to get to grips with some of the real problems of painting,” such as, for example, how to get started in the first place.

Moorhouse goes on to recount how Riley fell in with art-school cool kids and learned about the bohemian lifestyle, steeped herself in modernism’s developments, and tried her hand at various genres. She also became romantically involved with one of her former teachers and traveled with him to Europe to view, in person, masterpieces in some of the continent’s most venerable museums.

Still, Riley continued to slog through an agonizing, almost immobilizing struggle — even during later studies at the Royal Academy of Art — to make art she could genuinely call her own. Her goal: to create work that would capture the soul-stirring sensory exhilaration that had long marked her engagement with the world.

Her breakthrough came, as such discoveries often do, unexpectedly, at the beginning of the 1960s, as some drawing experiments with simple shapes in black and white, repeated and methodically manipulated, yielded stunning patterns. They were sensuous and teased the eye.

Moorhouse writes that Riley already had been taken by the notion “that something as rudimentary as a line contained within itself seeds that could evolve into sophisticated and subtle arrangements.” In time, he notes, looking itself became her subject. The conceptually simple, carefully crafted paintings she produced eventually became known as Op Art, a label she disliked. They represented, Moorhouse writes, “a new way of working characterised by absolute clarity, total purity of form and, in terms of its making, an objective, disciplined empiricism.”

In the autumn of 1961, Riley literally stumbled into the poet and art dealer Victor Musgrave’s Gallery One in London, an encounter that led to her first solo exhibition there and the launch of a career in which her razzle-dazzle creations seized the attention of enthusiastic collectors — she had to hire assistants to produce her paintings, since she could not make them fast enough herself to satisfy demand — and, ultimately, of the art world across the Atlantic, too. Her rising stature was cemented by the prominent inclusion of her work in The Responsive Eye, an exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1965 showcasing new art forms that explored optical sensations.  

The British critic David Sylvester pretty much nailed what Riley was up to when he wrote about her debut solo show at Musgrave’s in 1961. Her work’s “proposing and disposing of order” appeared to be “no mere game with optical effects,” he observed, but rather a dramatic “interplay of feelings of composure and anxiety.”

American critics were less appreciative. Some dismissed Riley’s paintings as all surface play, without thematic depth, but some of her fellow artists from the MoMA exhibition, including Josef Albers and Ad Reinhardt, savored her innovative achievements.

American critics were less appreciative. Some dismissed Riley’s paintings as all surface play, without thematic depth, but some of her fellow artists from the MoMA exhibition, including Josef Albers and Ad Reinhardt, savored her innovative achievements.

For better or worse, Op Art became another emblem of the swinging Sixties, even if Riley’s star faded (in those lean years, “I was eating paper” she told Moorhouse), only to shine again some two decades later, thanks largely to the promotional efforts of the recently deceased London art dealer Karsten Schubert, who recognized its uniqueness and hipness factor.

Moorhouse’s book traces Riley’s creative journey through the period of the 1965 MoMA show; he is now working on a sequel that will cover the later decades of her career. Right now, through September 22, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh is presenting Bridget Riley, a retrospective featuring signature examples of the artist’s Op Art paintings, along with rarely seen earlier works and later canvases, in which she explored color and pattern.

“Riley created a way of working that she almost exclusively occupies,” Moorhouse told me, adding, “She made art of her time that is highly idiosyncratic and, historically, she holds a highly individualistic position. She created a language to which she has remained steadfastly faithful.”

Bridget Riley: A Very Very Person (2019) by Paul Moorhouse is published by Ridinghouse.

Bridget Riley’s Razzle-Dazzle Career. By  Edward M. Gómez. Hyperallergic , September 14, 2019

Bridget Riley is a name so familiar that it seems baffling nobody has previously written in-depth about her early years, and how she rose to such a stellar place in our cultural lexicon. A new book from publisher Ridinghouse explores her journey from British wartime beginnings to her rise as darling of the New York art world—and one of the most famous proponents of op art in the world.

Riley was born in south London, before later moving to Cornwall during the war. What is it about Forest Hill exactly? For some, it’s best known for its proximity to the Horniman Museum, the site boasting a famously overstuffed walrus. For others, it’s (apparently) where Kate Bush lives. It turns out that Bridget Riley was born there too, when the area was a leafier suburb of the capital, and its these sort of details that the book Bridget Riley: A Very Very Person explores with a poetic, lyrical writing style from author Paul Moorhouse.

As Moorhouse points out in the book’s preface, “despite the proliferation of words about Riley’s art, there is a dearth of information about the artist herself… my main concern is to show that Riley’s art is rooted in much wider experience, and it elicits responses that transcend the visual… the life and the work are inseparable, and an appreciation of one illuminates the other.”

A Very Very Person is exhaustive in its exploration of this life, covering everything from Riley’s childhood pet cocker spaniel to her school reports (she didn’t have the best attendance record) to her parents’ concerns around art school and what attending one might mean for her “future need to earn a living” and her marriage prospects. But Moorhouse writes that young Riley “brushed these ideas aside. At this stage the idea of a career repulsed her. The notion of becoming an artist was not even an issue. She simply wanted to learn how to draw and paint.”

In 1949 she got her wish, studying at Goldsmiths in south London and living with relatives in Sydenham (albeit now struggling with the rather posh accent she’d picked up during her school years at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, according to the book.) During her time at Goldsmiths, Riley doggedly attended exclusively drawing classes, which meant she left the college with no qualifications. She was later awarded a place at the Royal College of Art when she was twenty-one. She subsequently suffered a breakdown, and her father was involved in a catastrophic car accident just before Riley was set to graduate; she never returned to the college to collect her qualification, instead joining her family to help care for her father.

Riley’s prospects didn’t look great; and A Very Very Person makes you work right to the end to find the turning point—the catalyst that explains when the Bridget Riley who flunked Goldsmiths became Bridget Riley the household name, and one of the few artists that even your mum has heard of. It was as the New York painters began to gain prominence, showing in exhibitions in London, that Riley’s interest in abstraction was piqued. “The idea that a painting could be a thing in itself began to take shape”, Moorhouse writes. A bedbug-hampered trip to Paris, and a study of the Impressionist’s paintings shortly afterwards, proved a revelation for the artist; who soon began copying works by Georges Seurat in a bid to find her own voice.

In 1961 Riley created Kiss, a piece that proved significant in the young artist’s self-realisation. “With Kiss she had made a crucial advance,” Moorhouse writes. “… she realised the importance of starting from purely pictorial elements organised coherently… she had renounced working from life and had created an abstract image with its own, independent identity.” This was the first step in her move toward strict geometry—the fundamentals of an image–and her explorations of symmetry, angles and how their arrangement could have a profound impact on the viewer.

Riley soon created her series Movement in Squares, showing for the first time as an artist aged thirty-one in a 1962 London exhibition. Just three years later, Riley had arrived in America to new acclaim: her first solo show in New York sold out; her “look” was splashed all over the pages of Vogue. Before she’d even tuned thirty-four, she’d “achieved a global platform for her work,” Moorhouse writes, a position that she holds to this day. It is an intimate, heartening look back at an artist whose name and reputation precedes her; sometimes, it’s important to remember that even one of the most successful artists in the world fought for her position, and that it doesn’t always come easy.

The Making of An Artist: How Bridget Riley Became the Queen of Op Art. By Emily Gosling. Elephant , September 1, 2019. 

Bridget Riley: A Very Very Person (2019) by Paul Moorhouse is published by Ridinghouse.

British artist Bridget Riley, who is known for bold, blocky, and striped canvases of brilliant hues and contrasts, got her first taste of international celebrity back in 1965. Curator William Seitz included two of her paintings, Current (1964) and Hesitate (1964), in his groundbreaking exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, titled “The Responsive Eye.” The eye-popping black-and-white squiggles of Riley’s Current adorned the catalogue cover, asserting Riley’s prominent position within the show. The exhibition situated her among an impressive roster of global artists whose artwork reconsidered ideas about perception. The group included American painters ranging from Morris Louis to Agnes Martin, along with Brazilian artist Almir da Silva Mavignier and a Spanish collective called Equipo 57. Along with Mavignier, Riley was considered part of a new wave of “Op artists” who exploited visual principles to make work that seemed to vibrate with new energy. Josef Albers, Salvador Dalí, and the museum-going public all swooned at Riley’s work.

While Op art has gone in and out of style, Riley herself is still working and is beloved on both sides of the pond. London’s Hayward Gallery is displaying a major Riley retrospective through January 26th, celebrating over six decades of the artist’s bold geometric abstratractions. Her hard-edged shapes and brilliant palettes have given way to infinite possibilities on her canvases. Riley’s work, which at first appears to be a collection of simple patterns, rewards sustained, careful looking; her work’s genius lies in the way her compositions gradually reveal a vital, dynamic interplay of shape and color. Yet Riley’s considerations reach far beyond the tricks and treats of optical games, urging viewers to rethink the way they see.

In a 2001 essay titled “The Change of Aspect,” John Elderfield described the experience of looking at a Riley canvas as a series of shocks. First, viewers see her rippling surfaces not as flat objects, but as living, moving things. Then, viewers realize they’re not in control—the paintings are working on them like actors with a “choreographed programme of effects.”

Riley’s interests, however, have always resided more in art history and landscape than in illusionism and artificiality. Born in London in 1931, Riley was a disengaged student in all subjects except visual art. She spent her childhood admiring the fields and beaches in Cornwall and Lincolnshire, where she lived throughout World War II.

In 1949, Riley gained entrance to Goldsmiths College on the strength of her copy of Jan van Eyck’s Portrait of a Man (Self Portrait?) (1433). Old Masters offered tutelage at the beginning of her career, as did her drawing courses with Sam Rabin at Goldsmiths: Both taught her how to look more carefully at art and the world around her.

In his Riley biography, A Very Very Person(2019), Paul Moorhouse described the risks Riley took in pursuing an art career in the mid–20th century, coming from a comfortable British background. “Being an artist was not only financially precarious but also implied a self-contained existence,” wrote Moorhouse. “Such a course seemed parlous for a woman at that time.” Riley forged ahead, obsessed with what Moorhouse called “the fundamental question of learning to look.” She left Goldsmiths for the Royal College of Art, graduated in 1955, and continued painting as she taught art courses and worked in advertising.

After a few attempts to make Georges Seurat–inspired Pointillist landscapes, Riley experienced major breakthroughs in 1960 and 1961. She made a series of black-and-white gouaches, followed by Veil (1960), which Moorhouse described as Riley’s “first hard-edged black-and-white painting.” These efforts led to Kiss (1961), a painting of large black volumes separated horizontally by an uneven, curved, white ramp shape. Finally, Riley “felt that at last she was on the right path,” wrote Moorhouse. The following year, London’s Gallery One gave Riley her first solo show. Her career was off to such a blazing start that the artist began employing studio assistants to keep up with demand for her paintings. While that practice is standard now, it was a bold move for her time.

Over the decades, Riley has continued to innovate, pushing her practice forward while staying loyal to her perceptual interests. She’s developed one of the most recognizable styles—perhaps even a personal brand—in contemporary art: You know a Bridget Riley painting when you see it.

Throughout the 1960s, Riley continued to focus on black-and-white Op compositions. Colored stripes soon became a predominant motif. In the 2000 essay “Bridget Riley for Americans,” Dave Hickey called these her “Flavin paintings” because they “flicker and flash” like artist Dan Flavin’s fluorescent tube sculptures. Riley’s 1967–68 canvas Late Morning features white stripes demarcated by thinner red lines, which are themselves bracketed by blue and green stripes. The experience of looking at the painting is akin to encountering a radiant glare—like late morning light, perhaps, through the blinds.

In the mid-1980s, Riley introduced parallelograms to her canvases, which slant like sun rays. Red Place (1987) features bricks in brilliant hues including rose, salmon, butterscotch, and aquamarine tilting towards the top right corner. The slight differentiation in the brick shapes, with large, single-hued patches in between, leaves the viewer’s eyes dancing while attempting to find a pattern. The next decade brought new iterations on the parallelogram motif. Riley’s blocky shapes adopted curved edges and began slithering across her canvases. One representative painting, Lagoon 2 (1997), features crescents and half-moons that fit together like puzzle pieces and evoke Henri Matisse’s famous paper cut-outs. Riley had used curves since the 1960s, so the shift united decades of ideas into a logical step forward.

Examining Riley’s dynamic career is a master class in how to innovate within the strictures of geometric abstraction—and how to weather shifts in popular opinion. Damien Hirst has named Riley as an influence, and in 2012, she became the first woman to receive the prestigious Sikkens Prize.

After the craze surrounding “The Responsive Eye” in 1965, Riley feared that no one would take her seriously for at least 20 years. She didn’t need to worry: Avoiding her newfound celebrity, she hunkered down in her studio, and—nearly six decades later—she’s carved a singular place in recent art history. As Frances Spalding wrote in a 1999 essay titled “Bridget Riley and the Poetics of Instability,” “One of the most radical moves in the history of post-1945 British art was Bridget Riley’s decision to destabilize the image.”

Bridget Riley’s Paintings Continue to Mesmerize, Six Decades On. By  Alina Choen. Artsy , November 1, 2019.

Bridget Riley’s first big solo show was in 1971: a survey of the 40-year-old artist’s work at London’s recently opened Hayward Gallery. 48 years later, Riley has been re-ensconced for a celebratory homecoming. Truth be told, the British optical artist has been a regular returnee: there is something kindred in the spirit of gallery and artist. Creative forces formed in the post-war years, both she and the Hayward sprung into the public sphere forward facing, dynamic, fired by fresh vision and new ways of looking.

Architecturally, the broad un-pillared spaces of the Hayward are a gift to Riley, allowing for the installation of large wall paintings and for her canvases to vibrate, uncrowded, in relative isolation. Rather than an exhaustive, chronological overview, the exhibition takes an elevated swoop through the painter’s evolving concerns, clustering neat groups of paintings by common theme: curves, say, or monochromes. It is fiercely edited, building a narrative of echo and change rather than repetition. Airy and crisp, this is a very handsome exhibition.

 If anything, the opening gallery verges on too airy, its double height space filled with nothing but the fine black lines of the wall painting Composition With Circles 4 (2004) and Riley’s only three-dimensional work, Continuum (1963/2005), a spiral booth painted to suggest zones of acceleration and deceleration, compression and elongation. Riley wasn’t much taken with Continuum – it was too literal an immersion in the painted field – and kept her surfaces unfurled thereafter.

Composition With Circles 4 suggests a different means of immersion, paintings of a scale such that, as with Monet’s water lily paintings at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, the eyes detect no edge. Paintings that invite an ocular bathe. Her large paintings make a strong case for embodied encounters with art: they are glorious advocates for the gallery space itself. Resigning the illusion that all can be seen at once, they allow the eye to dart, now here, now there, now deep, now shallow, now leaping out beyond the surface. 

Passage through the show has been left similarly open, with no set direction. Two lower galleries are devoted to Riley’s exploration of black and white, and to her paintings in which colours play, clash and mingle in arrangements of stripes and diagonals. The black and white section suggests Riley in the era of her Hayward exhibition of 1971, albeit with some recent updates. Paintings on board, Plexiglas, canvas and wall surfaces test the behaviour and possibilities of circles, squares and triangles as they flood across a plane to encounter a spatial crisis into which they must slip and then resolve themselves.

Cool as they may seem, like classical drama, Riley’s paintings pivot on the threat of crisis or discord and the possibility of harmony restored. Harmony isn’t always. Some paintings continue to emit a furious rhythm to the point where they pain the eyes. Current (1964), fine vertical waves that corrugate at the centre of the picture, hisses with static, threatening to spark if touched. Climax (1963) erupts ever upwards on a vase-shaped board that seems to bow at the centre. After all that tension, the solid black curve and line of Kiss (1961) is a soothing relief.

The show’s languid pacing and lofty scale becomes intense and intimate during a dive into Riley’s studio and biography. Drawings dating back to the artist’s school years chart a journey through adolescent self-portraiture, deft art school life studies and meticulous diagnoses of the colours performing in an interior scene. She lushes out on Bonnard’s colours, takes a line for a walk with Klee and paints an unlikely interior in the style of Matisse. During the 1950s she produces assured highly individual portraits in red chalk. Her encounter with Seurat’s pointillism comes like a thunderclap. It is through studying his paintings, analyzing and literally reproducing his methodology that Riley started working toward her own experiments in perception. Her shimmering coloured stripes carry colour as Seurat’s rolling fields do, broadcasting ‘light’, ‘autumn’ and ‘evening’ through the strategic interplay of tone.

Walls of studio studies and cartoons show that Riley’s work is preparatory: she experiments, studies, elaborates and keeps looking. The final paintings are made by assistants. Since 2000 those experiments have taken her along two distinct paths. Most recently, dot paintings in calm orange, purple and green nod back to her 1970 work Vapour. More energetically, a dramatic series of curving colour studies, sliced by patches of white, that recall the dynamism of Islamic calligraphy. The red, orange, green and grey wall work Rajasthan (2012) feels like a painting that has shattered into diagonal bands, simultaneously all curves and all straight lines. In Red with Red Triptych (2010) Riley uses the wall itself to provide bands of chilling white between triptych panels that pulse hot with red, pink and indigo. She can still make your head spin.

Bridget Riley at Hayward Gallery Review: The Queen of Op Art Can Still Make Your Head Spin. By Hettie Judah , Frieze, October 22, 2019.

The word “BRiley” – like some fortuitous fusion of “brilliant” and “wily” – appears on some of the most spectacular paintings in British art. This is Bridget Riley’s signature, tucked modestly round the edge of the canvas, and about the only aspect of her work that never changes. At 88, Riley is still finding new ways to dazzle and exhilarate the eyes and mind with the slenderest of means, each canvas a sustained revelation from a mind that remains forever young.

Take a recent work from her Measure for Measure series. At a distance, the coloured discs on the white substrate scintillate like sequins, even in their muted tones of purple, green and brown. Walk closer and the picture performs a new magic. Green dances against purple, which sparks against brown, until the discs seem to jump and shiver; each leaving an afterimage, moreover, where the whole surface seems alive with the glistening patter of raindrops on water.

A fourth colour appears in the next version: dull turquoise – and yet the day brightens. The painting has its own weather. This is a marvel considering all you’re looking at is an array of drab discs on white paint; more extraordinary still, that radiance seems to float free, transmitting its light to another work hanging alongside. Some of this is to do with the complex interplay of optics, colour and perception, of course, and with measurements of all kinds (Riley’s titles are always epigrammatic). But it is an effect scarcely seen in any other artist.

This is a stunning lifetime survey, the paintings speaking back and forth over more than six decades, from the coruscating early op-art to the vast, sweeping curves of Riley’s latest murals. One work is even dated 2009-1970, reversing convention to make the point. And in a riveting gallery of early drawings, miniature prototypes and homages to Seurat, Riley goes all the way back to show her workings.

In the great all-together-now of her work, every painting seems constantly active, shifting in some continuous present. Even a painting such as Pause doesn’t really stop, but keeps right on happening before your eyes as the grid of black dots flows into a curious dip, and then continues seductively onwards. It is the visual presentiment of a time warp.

The permutations of geometric forms are so openly declared, every time, you feel it ought to be possible to deduce the underlying principles. But consider Static, with its deftly punning title. This grid of tiny black ovals – 21 rows of 21, to be exact – is arranged across a large white canvas. Each oval tilts in a slightly different direction, perhaps according to some fundamental algorithm. But these facts don’t begin to explain the way the eye is sent ricocheting across the painting, nor the peculiar tension between still image and ever-expanding field of vision, nor the electrifying sense of crackle and hum.

Parallel curves can shimmer, undulate or pool in swaying eddies. Vertical stripes come in sheaves, glades, bristling pageants. Minute irregularities produce optical flashes, slight overlaps of colour release atmospheric new tints. With a simple array of triangles, black on white, Riley can do painting fast and slow. With a handful of hues she can get mirror-bright silver, or the desert light of ancient Egypt.

The intense precision of her art – its strict formal logic – seems to allow for a wild, almost synaesthetic freedom. The nap of velvet, autumn smoke, a buzz of high-pitched aggression: people claim to have all sorts of experiences in front of a Riley. No matter how poised, how meticulously calculated, her abstractions are never aloof. And they can be as evocative of nature’s ever-changing effects as old-fashioned Romantic art: dawn mist, sea haar, the shimmer of heat on a summer road. Light fluctuates, as if seen through moving branches, and a dark glow comes off a work called November. The paintings have their individual seasons and climates.

Progressing through small rooms to the vast open galleries of the Hayward, this show gives the clearest possible sense of Riley’s abstractions as a form of expression as well as a visual philosophy. Seductive, erotic, piercing, tense, the edginess of the early works gives way to calmer, richer, more contemplative works, a blaze of red gathering speed in a multi-panel painting, the delight of the great outdoors lassoed in whiplash curves. And for anyone trying to suppress the obvious analogy with music, there is that massive canvas called Aria, its high stripes of hot and cold colours rising to a sonorous crescendo.

Generally, Riley’s titles stand in relation to the image like titles to a poem. Neither summation nor definition, they do not aim to pin down some elusive meaning. Since nothing in the seen world ever stays still, that would be all against the spirit of her work. And the pleasures of seeing are Riley’s perpetual subject, including the very movements of the eye in all its split-second fits and starts. A painting such as Blaze, with its immaculately graded spirals running in opposing directions, eventually centring on a vanishing point, is like a human eye in itself: lucid, ever-shifting, quick with radiant vitality. Ocular sensation becomes this picture’s adventure.

Has any painter ever looked better in the inhospitable canyons of the Hayward Gallery? Riley’s art seems to be made for these colossal spaces, unadorned and without any natural light. Small works draw the eye in sharply with uninterrupted intensity; big works such as the beautiful Late Morning have enough space to exert their full force of personality, emitting a daylight of their own. You can stand a hundred feet away from the biggest of these pictures and witness them like landscape at a distance, and then come close to relish the little local events, much as you would when walking through nature.

This perfectly suits some of Riley’s most complicated works, where the intersection of curves and opposing diagonals is almost impossible to follow, still less analyse, yet which seems to yield a surprising succession of familiar forms – ribbons, flags, kites, curlicues and leaping flames. These shapes appear in one of the show’s final masterpieces, titled Rajasthan, which is painted directly on the wall – a startling frieze of orange, red and green that rushes upwards like fire.

Like so much of late Riley, the vision is grand: a composition that is tightly controlled and yet plainly mysterious. There are hints of Hindu script, of blinding sunshine, blazing heat, perhaps even funeral pyres. The title, the swooping forms and colours: all the associations with place or emotion are there. But they are not the point, so much as the experience Bridget Riley creates for the eye. Here is this magnificent vision – a dream that appears to float in mid-air, its double reflected in the polished floor below like the Taj Mahal in its pool. The image will vanish when the exhibition ends. It is the perceptual embodiment of a mirage.

Bridget Riley review – still finding new ways to dazzle and exhilarate. By Laura Cumming. The Guardian , November 2, 2019.

Website Southbank Centre, London